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The Unfortunate Incident During Thursday's Practice

Carter put the sealed metal case on Dr. Waynerite’s desk gently and shuffled his feet. Sebastian stomped clumsily into the room and slammed an identical case down next to it. Carter noticed Waynerite wincing at Sebastian’s careless handling of the container. Sebastian must have noticed too.

“I’m sure they’re all fine in there,” Sebastian said sheepishly.

Waynerite flicked the latches on the cases open with his thumbs and gently opened them up, grinning. Carter leaned forward, standing on his toes a bit, trying to get another glimpse of what was inside. Waynerite slid a single glass cylinder out of the case, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. It was just over three inches long and an inch wide, and inside was a little man, only slightly smaller than his glass prison, beating his tiny fists against the glass. He was wearing a blue and grey football uniform–the Granite State University colors–and Carter noticed the number 60 on his back. It was one of the guys he knew of from his brief association with a member of the team.

For two years Carter had been assigned to tutor Jerry Ramos, the team’s starting tight end. Number 60 was a hulking defensive end with a thick manly beard named Dean Caldwell, Jerry Ramos’ roommate–was being the operative word, since the bulky man who used to stare down at people from his 6'5" height was now somewhere around three inches tall. Once Jerry had mentioned that Dean tipped the scales at over 325 lbs, and Carter remembers seeing Dean play, laying his opponents out flat with his bulk. Now Dean fell against each side of his glass prison as Waynerite gently tipped the cylinder back and forth. He probably only weighed a few ounces now, and a gentle nudge from a pinky finger would topple the formerly gigantic athlete to the ground.

Waynerite slid the cylinder back in the case and gently ran his fingers along its lid. “So this is all of them? Every last one?”

Carter winced as dopey Sebastian spoke up first: “Naw, but it’s a whole lot of ‘em. Some of 'em didn’t quite make it.” He chuckled, then cleared his throat as Waynerite glared at him.

“We didn’t leave anyone behind,” Carter interjected, trying to resolve the situation. “Some of them… Didn’t make it.” He elbowed Sebastian, who unzipped a backpack and pulled out a soggy paper bag with a squishy mass inside. He set it on the desk with a splat.

“Some of them tried to cross the track around the field before we got there,” Carter explained. “They were so small, the sun on the black tar just kinda… Cooked them. But we cleaned them all up.”

Before Carter had arrived at the field, he had no idea what to expect. Waynerite had told him and Sebastian, who both did a work study with the physics department, that a massive electromagnetic event had taken place around the football field.

“Freak accident,” he explained. “Combination of cosmic forces and the earth’s magnetic field…”

According to Waynerite, one moment the team was practicing on the field in their uniforms with their coaches and staff; the next, the field looked empty, as if the team had entirely vanished. In reality, they’d all been miniaturized, clothes and all, to no more than a few inches tall each.

To them, Carter imagined, the blades of grass suddenly loomed above them. Even men standing next to each other were suddenly separated by a great distance. They must have fled in a panic, sprinting for something recognizable, and those who were close enough suddenly realized what happened when they got off the field and saw the track, suddenly miles long, and figured out vaguely what had happened to them.

Carter and Sebastian had found the smoking remains of a few of the men dotting the track and collected them in a bag. Carter had tried to feel something–sadness, revulsion–as he collected the remains; “These were people,” he tried to think, but it was so hard to consider them with any significance. They were just little pieces of refuse littering the ground and he was just cleaning up the mess.

The rest of the team was scattered along the field. Carter and Sebastian spent hours on all fours with small, padded tweezers, plucking the terrified little men from their hiding places in the grass and dropping them into little glass containers. Their uniforms made them easy to identify, and Carter and Sebastian just crossed them off the list until they’d found them all.

Carter clearly remembered staring down at each little man he found, getting up close to him. Their reduced vocal chords made their new voices comically high-pitched, shrill squeaks like cartoon chipmunks. They still had their muscles, their thick beefy bodies, but they were nothing against Carter’s tweezers. Even the fastest ones could barely cover a foot before they were captured.

“I accidentally squished a couple,” Sebastian said quietly, kicking at the floor. “Oh, and a couple of times I was so excited that I found them that I shouted to Carter real loud…”

Carter remembered Sebastian shouting like an imbecile, his tiny capture only inches from his face: “I got one! I got one!” The sound was too much for the tiny men, who bled from their ears, nose and mouth. They had no choice but to put them out of their misery with their shoes.

They were just bugs; a gentle crush and they were nothing.

Waynerite nodded and swept the sopping wet bag off the desk into the trashcan. “No worries, boys. Accidents happen. As long as you’re certain you’ve accounted for every last one…”

“We have,” Carter said, unfolding the team roster from his pocket with every name crossed off.

“Including coaching staff?”

“And assistants, and waterboys,” Carter said.

“Excellent. You’ll receive a bonus in your check this week.” Waynerite shooed them away with his hands. “I have work to do.”

Sebastian, obviously happy to be free, headed for the door, but Carter stood in place.

“Dr. Waynerite,” he said softly, working up the courage to get to the question he’d anxiously held in his gut all afternoon, “what do you plan to do with them now?”

Waynerite had the cases open again, examining their contents, clearly looking for someone in particular. “Well, Carter, this kind of accident has to be researched–this is an amazing phenomenon, much to learn, you see.” His eyebrows bounced when he found what he was looking for and slid out a single cylinder, flicking out his tongue as he held it close. Inside was a burly older gentleman, looking worn and battered after several hours in the wilderness of the football field. It was the team’s head coach, barrel-chested, mustachioed Dick Breitbart. “Those who survived will have to be studied to learn the phenomenon’s full effects, and a way to reverse them, if any exists. But I happen to be an expert on exactly the kinds of energies that caused this terrible incident, so it’s more than likely that I’ll receive a significant amount of funding to carry out this study. So I guess it’s fortunate that the school is without a football team now; it seems there won’t be any questions as to where my funding will come from.” He’d unscrewed the glass case and held Coach Breitbart in his hand. Even from several feet away, Carter could see the tiny coach trembling, his eyes wide as he tried to take in the giant world around him, the skyscraper of a human being who now held him in his hand.

“I guess this is an unexpected resolution to our last argument, Breitbart,” Waynerite said with a devilish grin, poking his index finger into Breitbart’s chest with increasing force. “It seems science is going to turn out to be more important than athletics after all.”

Waynerite regarded Carter with annoyance suddenly, as if he’d forgotten he was in the room. “You can go now, Carter,” he ordered.

“Dr. Waynerite, I was wondering,” Carter asked, his voice cracking as he forced the words out, “if I couldn’t… You know… Since some of them didn’t make it anyway, I didn’t think it would hurt at all if I could take one of them… For my own…”

Waynerite sat pensively for a few minutes before putting Breitbart back in the glass cylinder and setting it on the desk. “You want to take one of these men? For what purpose?”

“…because he deserves it,” Carter said. He’d spent all day on the field, hoping he would find a minuscule little man with an 82 on his back, but Sebastian must have found him. Part of him had hoped Jerry would’ve been squashed or cooked on the track, but another part of him was relieved that he wasn’t. Sebastian must have collected him. If Carter had found the little tight end, Jerry would’ve never made it into the collection.

Waynerite sat back in his chair and folded his hands, looking first at Carter, then at the two cases, the fifty or so powerful men reduced to helpless insects, chirping desperately in their incomprehensible, barely audible voices.

Hours later Carter sat in his dorm room clicking through the pictures on Jerry’s Facebook page. “See that one?” he said aloud. “Look how big you were there!” On the palm of his hand was a playing card, the Joker, on which tiny Jerry Ramos, the team’s musclebound tight end, lay naked and spread eagle, his wrists and ankles affixed to the card with trimmed pieces of scotch tape. Carter held the card up next to the screen. “Wow, you’re about half the size of a PHOTO of you. Jesus, you are TINY!”

The taunting had been fun at first but, like all things, Carter was feeling less and less enjoyment the longer he did it. Still, he couldn’t shake the memory of Jerry’s fake flirtiness during their tutoring sessions, the syrupy tone of voice he’d used in the beginning when asking Carter to just do the work for him. The shame at the eagerness with which he had jumped at Jerry’s every damned stung his belly. He clicked ahead a few photos, still holding up playing-card-bound Jerry for comparison. He stopped at a pic he’d spent many hours looking at, studying ever curve of Jerry’s ripped, bulging body: he was on the beach in a bathing suit flexing one huge arm, the other wrapped around a small blonde girl. Her name was Kelli, Carter knew, and at that moment she was probably wondering why Jerry wasn’t returning her texts.

“You know,” Carter said, turning the card to face the image on the laptop screen, “I could drop this little playing card in an envelope and mail you to her and she’d probably squash you trying to get it open.” He paused to let the words sink in, watching Jerry’s massive chest rise and fall, his rippled abs moving with each breath. “What would she even do with you if she had you? Probably drop you in an aquarium, forget to feed you, too busy dating another guy–a real man, not cockroach-bait like you, huh?”

Carter held the card close to his face, examining the tiny body, remembering when it’d been full sized: the gravity it used to have, the manly smell that filled the room. Jerry’s thick, vein-dissected hands had emanated strength; now he was a fraction of the size of his smallest finger. He examined the dick that used to be massive, remembered staring up at it that one night when Jerry had showed up to his tutoring session drunk. “Look at that little dick. Remember when I was choking on it? Remember when you held the back of my head still anyway?” Carter winced with the memory of the backhands he’d received when Jerry ordered him to keep his mouth quiet about what he’d done.

“Still want me to make you cum?” Carter asked, sliding an unsharpened pencil from his desk. He set the card down flat, nudging Jerry’s flaccid dick with the unused pink eraser. “Let’s see how many times I can get you to cum, little man.” From a different drawer he pulled a box of Q-tips; from yet another he pulled out a half-squeezed tube of lube. He greased a Q-tip and twirled it around, poking at little Jerry’s tiny asshole with it. “Aw, is that too big little man? No worries. Just like you said to me, 'You’ll get used to it.’” With his other hand he prodded Jerry’s cock until it was rock hard. The tiny man squeaked like an old video game as he struggled in vain. Carter couldn’t understand him, not like any amount of begging or apologies would help now. Just like before, it was hard to feel any pity for this little thumbprint of a living thing. Just like Waynerite, he had some research to do: how many loads could he milk out a division 1 athlete? And more importantly, how long would it take him to get bored of his little pet and finally swallow him once again, for the last time?

After a successful meet, the three powerlifters lumbered back to the locker room and shed their jumpsuits, squeezing their huge frames through the door to the sauna for a long, relaxing steam.

Little did they know that their opponents had futzed with the steam room controls. The three gorillas dozed off... And when they woke up, they each saw two skinny little chess-nerds sitting next to them where their teammates had been, and discovered a bony ribcage and bird-arms as they looked down over their once ample-frames.

They had no hope of fitting back into their jumpsuits, so they zippered up the shirts and wondered how they were going to explain to their girlfriends (who now towered over them) who they really were.

The alien domination of Earth didn’t take too long--they had superior technology, certainly, and the fact that the human race constantly warred with itself made the take-over effortless.

The grey bug-eyed aliens considered themselves kind rulers: they had no desire to enslave anyone, nor did they want to cause any harm. With their technology they repaired the environment and cured diseases. The human race was given food and medicine. Life expectancy was doubled almost immediately, and because of the confiscation of all weapons, war and violence ended as well.

Some things, the aliens decided, seemed a little excessive: many of these humans were simply too large to be feasible members of this new harmonious society. Bodybuilders, strongmen, football players--these were unnecessary professions, and the cost to feed these gargantuan humans was unreasonable and their muscle mass was unnecessary.

Still, the kind alien rulers offered a compromise: a simple process using a device no human had ever seen before to allow these members of society to continue to excessively expand their musculatures, or a reduced diet, intended to slim them down to average proportions within months, allowing them to live normal lives.

The device, a gleaming ray-gun that gave off an unearthly hum even when it was powered down, terrified most people, especially when they were told that the process was permanent: not even the aliens could undo it once it had been done. Most of the men deemed “excessively developed” took the second offer, ate their little freeze-dried alien-designed meals until they blended in with normal society. Big linemen became tall skinny guys. Bodybuilders were just skinny average guys with chests the same size their legs used to be. With time, they forgot what it was like to be big, forgot that it was something they ever wanted.

 Some humans were stubborn, as humans are known to be, and chose the irreversible ray-gun. Leo, a world-record holding strongman, had worked too hard to achieve what he had. He wasn’t born to be anything else, he’d argued when the aliens allowed him to choose his fate. “I was built to lift things and that’s it,” he argued. So the aliens pointed the ray gun at him and bathed him in purple light. Most people on hand thought he’d been disintegrated, but the aliens approached him shortly after, lost in a pile of the clothes he’d been wearing, and placed him in a tiny glass jar.

His girlfriend Jeannie had protested the whole thing, screamed when the ray hit him, and stared at her now-tiny boyfriend in his little glass prison, wondering what she was going to do now. “He’ll need to be processed,” the aliens explained. “Henceforth he will always need a sponsor, as he can take care of himself no longer. You will be eligible to be his sponsor if you wish after his processing.” They walked away as naked little Leo beat against the sides of the jar.

 Only about ten percent of the oversized population chose the reduction process. The football players kept their jobs, of course--the mini-NFL took awhile to catch on, of course. Micro-cameras eliminated perspective enough that people watching at home could barely tell anything was different, although ticket sales plummeted for awhile. Watching professional athletes battle on a field smaller than a foosball table became a novelty, but eventually people got used to it, and the spectacle of the whole thing garnered great attention. The first mini-Super Bowl broke viewing records. Other than the accident in Texas, when a fan burst past guards and smashed his hand down on the field, things went smoothly (and security has been appropriately beefed up since then).

 Bodybuilding shows continued, judges wearing jeweler’s monocles to inspect the tiny athletes’ physiques--which, after the reduction, became monstrous proportional to their six-inch frames. Super-heavyweight bodybuilders in the mini-IFBB (10.1-11.0 ounces) waddled around like super-vascular pincushions of muscle. Who knew the human body could expand to such amazing sizes when it was shrunk down to a height of only half a foot?

 Lastly, the World’s Strongest Man competition continued--rebranded the World’s Strongest Mite--with competitors hoisting up regular-sized objects, dragging around Barbie’s dreamcar and Transformers, and trying to lift regular 12-ounce cans of soda overhead. Halfthor Bjornssen--nicknamed “the Molehill” since he reached his new height of 7-inches, leaving him still a giant among the reduced men--still competes and still acts, although much camera-trickery was needed to make it seem like he wasn’t a mere fraction of his former self.

 All of these men needed sponsors, of course, since they were helpless to survive in society without them. Many were adopted by their wives and girlfriends, while others (like Halfthor, for example) were sponsored by fans who passed an extreme security check and paid a hefty sum of money. (It’s illegal to consider these reduced men “property,” per the alien’s decree, but it was hard to deny that many of the sponsors acted like they “owned” their little men--like the gentleman who sponsored Halfthor, carrying him around in a birdcage most of the time.)

 As for little Leo, his girlfriend considered sponsoring him but passed on the idea (while he was being processed, she found another man--one of normal height--and passed on the idea of caring for her pet-sized ex-) but he was adopted by his coach, who pumped him full of steroids (one ampoule lasted forever with a six-inch powerlifter) and let him train and feed and grow as much as he wanted to. In shock after the process, Leo decided to quit competing (not wanting to be paraded around as an oddity). Instead, he just trains in his little aquarium, lifting heavier and heavier weights, swelling up with more muscle, ignoring everything but the call of the metal.

 His life is quite idyllic, in fact--except when he hears the door-creak, loud as a siren, followed by earth-shaking footsteps as his coach invites friends over to drink and watch him train. Plenty of his coach’s powerlifting clients chose the first option, the sensible reduction, and every one of them gets a charge out of coming over to watch Leo’s swollen little body lift meager weights while drinking beers, and, after a few too many, grabbing hold of Leo’s little body to feel how meaningless it was to have big massive muscles if a normal man could pop them like zits.

(via Strongman 26702 - MyMuscleVideo)